


Like So Many Alexanders

by ParadoxR



Series: Unto the Breach, Dear Friends [7]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Leadership, Military, Military Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:43:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1728164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxR/pseuds/ParadoxR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The reason SG-1 didn't get a fourth member in season 8, explained via a "Proving Ground" training demo (standalone, no spoilers).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like So Many Alexanders

 A/N: Edited from chapter 12 of what was "Unto the Breach".

* * *

 

“Then why are none of them on SG-1?” Sam nods. Common question from new  ~~patch chasers~~  SG trainees, even if it did make everyone in the bay cringe at the naiveté.

“Good question. Because it takes a long time. All the allies we’re the liaisons for? They all need to approve someone before they’ll do wartime exchanges. It’s like signing off on the diplomatic party. That was hard enough with fewer allies when Daniel died, even bringing around a rapid-acquire genius we could reasonably present as disinterested. Getting that trust when last year looked like the home stretch?” Sam scoffs a laugh despite Daniel’s clairvoyantly pointed look. “Well, it wasn’t high on most meeting agendas.” – _And briefing mode, engaged.–_  She rolls her eyes inwardly at her inner six-year-old boy. “…Switching 1Cs in itself takes months: for another 1C on rotation and serving on a stopgap just learning all the team-specific background. And then we have to train with them for up to a dozen cycles before they’re ready to actually roll out.” Cam’s uncomfortable  _–Well, you’re briefing moding him–_  and Sam needs an excuse to shift the focus. She smiles. Teal’c shifts unmovingly. “Hey, Reber, Devlin!”

 

“Yes, Ma’am!” The captains are F&C in seconds, exactly in sync but still trying to outdo one another.

She trades a stance with Teal’c, her eyes still locked on the candidates.  _Demonstration. All yours._

“DanielJackson, I believe it is most unwise to allow the Hetchan treaty to progress under Delran’s lines.” Seamlessly, SG-33 clears the floor. ‘Everyone enjoys a good show’, Sharma thinks at her, ever-friendly grin growing and contagious.

 _“And why’s that?”_  Daniel switches languages and Devlin swallows nervously. Asgard still wasn’t his strong suit. Made Wednesdays on up levels a damn-and-a-half.

 _“Delran’s priorities are misplaced. His issue is not at consequence.”_ Sam watches the gears turning in Devlin’s head, while Reber’s eyebrows shoot up.

 _“Darnit, Teal’c. We’ve been over this. It’s not that simple.”_  Sam studies her candidates. Come, guys. Let’s go.

“…Gentlemen?” She tries.

“What do you think, Ma’am?” Oh well. Not a bad recovery, Dev.

Sam nods poker-faced, joining behind Teal'c. The electric blue flash surprises everyone, except Daniel, who takes the split second to gain on Sam. They’re on the floor immediately, pitting his SG-MCMAP brown belt against her black. She’s always hated zat recharge time. Sam finds her opening, flipping over to use Teal’c’s limp body as a shield for next Daniel’s strike. She’s got him pinned on their teammate in seconds, zat trained on both of them until she can drag the conscious man off and change his state. She cross-bands both and waits for them to come around. Teal’c’s first, though he doesn’t show it to anyone who can’t tell. He’s certainly setting about breaking the band though, and her internal countdown starts ticking. 80 seconds, minimum. (He won’t be out of the band, but he’ll be ready to take her, and though she’ll probably still win, it’s time consuming and too soon to rezat without a kill shot.) The dead zone time.

“Time?” Sam demands, tilting at the candidates without losing eye contact. She hears unvocalized the “err…” from both of them, despite their own zats trained on the downed men.

“2 minutes?” “40 seconds?”

Ah well. “ _Then maybe you should do something._ ” They both spring, not knowing where they’re going—

“Think first.” Reber supplies, stilling and hastily pre-echoing the order he knows the SG CO is about to give.

“Always.” She confirms.

 

Daniel’s conscious, again without altering anyone else. “Code in, Daniel.”

“Sorry” he creaks. Sam eyes him skeptically, which he feels through closed eyelids. “Sam, come on. I got confused. I talked about Delran with you last week.”

“False testimony.” Devlin declares. “Code 17.”

Sam sighs inwardly. “Good. Do it. Reber, Teal’c.” Both captains’ eyes widen slightly, but their composure holds. Good for them. Reber positions himself between Daniel and Teal’c, facing the Jaffa. Devlin approaches Daniel, checking his band by feel as he studies his eyes, his neck, and pulls open his jaw. His hand comes to his heart, and he waits. Of course, the candidate presumes there’s nothing actually Code 17 about Daniel right now.

“Nothing. Follow-on 4.”

Teal’c is off his feet before anyone else realizes he was on them. Sam braces simultaneously, “Kill shot!”, as Devlin turns pivots help Reber protect bogey-Daniel. Teal’c’s dead (feigned dead) body collides with Sam. She swings off, and Daniel’s at her back. He can’t take her, but he can keep on her hard enough to take her down in a zat net if someone fires. Reber does. “Kill shot!” and they both fall to the ground.

Sam extracts herself, shaking off feigned second-net effects. “Very well done, gentlemen…” She smiles contagiously.

“…Unfortunately, wrong answer.” She finishes to their conscious forms.

 

Daniel and Teal’c stand up beside her. “They have  _got_ to stop trusting you like that.”

“Tell me about it. He keeps pushing Code 17s on you, we’ll never get anything done.” She doesn’t sound the joke, but Daniel takes it in stride anyway. – _Our favorite absent minded professor.–_

Her team waits patiently for both candidates to surface. They do, flawlessly—their behavior not changing an ounce to a non-SG. A lot of things are common proficiencies on the teams; they just have to focus on what’s not. She studies their limp bodies, letting them stew for a moment to see what they might do. Reber’s collapse nonethless needs work; he’s going to hurt himself one day even in training. Still, they’re both great candidates. Devlin’s a physiologist: utterly brilliant on basically everything that lacks chloroplasts and central vacuoles. Reber was only a few months behind him in earning his EFMB, and the latter man’s dissertation concerned indigenous peoples’ identification and use of flora—turns out he could handle basically anything autotrophic and the soil it grows in. The EFMBs would’ve been more helpful to her before Fifth decided to dump Janet’s entire life in her head, but in terms of flora and fauna she was eager for either skillset. And they were fast burns: Reber could make FGO before decading. 30 seconds. Guess they’d given up.

“End Ex.” Sam orders, grimacing at both of them. They straighten out painfully. “Debrief.”

“False negative for testimony.” Devlin offers immediately. “It wasn’t a Code 17.”

“Why?”

“State actually unknown. I jumped because you weren’t here last week, but you guys aren’t like the way we are on 21. It should have been a  _3_ 7-4.”

“Yes. What were you doing when you came to?”

Reber grimaces, but it doesn’t seep into the directness of his report. “Thinking, Ma’am,” he delivers earnestly. She turns her attention to Devlin.

“Likewise, Ma’am.” But he’s more cowed.

“You should do that faster.”

“Yes, Ma’am!!” in unison. Ugh.

“But you didn’t give up?”

“No, Ma’am!!” Ugh again. At least Reber had broken his Ma’am-sandwich habit from post-Annapolis. (Devlin was an OTS guy, and the exemplar of why HWS had jumped head-first into the OTS selection gig.)

“Do not pop off at me, gentlemen.” Her voice is stern, but with an honest candidness. They pause the beat. At least there’s that. “And stop grimacing. I already know you screwed up. You’ll have your chance to review it properly.” Faces go to poker immediately. Sam puffs a chuckle. “That doesn’t mean expressionless, guys,” she inserts to her CGOs more softly. “What else?” A tempo.

“I need to learn Asgard.”

Daniel chuckles.  _“Yes, yes you do.”_ He offers to Devlin, who cringes.

Reber digs through his memory for his would-be CO. Post-mortems are almost always the hardest part. “Your zat fall still isn’t good enough.”

Reber blinks composedly, exactly as tumbled by her interruptive assessment as she’d intended him to be. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Yes, Ma’am…” what?

“I’ll work on it. Tonight. Live fire.” Sam winces a few inches beneath her skin. Sounds like a rough night, son.

“Be better. What else?”

“I think my DTZ was wrong.” Reber replies immediately, back on his metaphorical feet.

“What is it?”

“You were within Sector Blue, so it’s closer to 90 seconds than 2 mikes.”

“Devlin?”

“I like 90 seconds. Teal’c took Daniel’s strike right to the shoulder blade, which even from Daniel for him would slow down a band break.”

“  _“From Daniel?_ ” ” The target linguist inserts with feigned pique.

The captain stumbles. “I—err…Doctor, Sir,”  _–“Doctor, Sir?”– Leave him be, Jack._ “I just meant that Teal’c’s, well, Teal’c.” Daniel’s subvocalized chuckle matches her own, genuine into the corner of her eye and ear. An ‘aren’t these guys cute’ with an ‘ohh yeah, don’t we know that’. Daniel's head tilt passes it back to Sam.

“Alright. Actual answer is—” “80” SG-1 finishes, the one voice dissolving as imperceptibly as it started. “Also?”

 “I didn’t sense when Daniel woke up.”

“Me neither, and I was way too slow on Teal’c’s assault.” Sam nods. Alertness confirmations and telegraphings are some of the most personal things about a person.

“Far too slow, both of you. But back to Daniel.”

“We were too slow at the second blitz. And I shouldn't have shot him dead.”

“Thanks for noticing.” Daniel answers, happy he'd finally realized.

“Definitely not. That was Ex failure for you.” Reber winces. “But you’re both missing the root cause.”

“Teal’c was right about Delran.”

“I agree, but not the point.”

Reber corrects himself. “Teal’c really does think he’s right about Delran.”

_“Indeed.”_

**Author's Note:**

> SG-MCMAP(*): SG version of USMC Martial Arts: counter-Jaffa, non-injuring takedowns, etc. Brown is minimum for all infantry (now). Someone more knowledgeable can yell at me.  
> Surfacing*: If I had all that nightmare fuel and a habit of coming to in prisons/at labor camps/with false memories/unconscious in an alien forest/in a fake SGC, I would think before I move.  
> Code 17; Follow on 4*: One permutation of a zillion different bad-thing-happened protocols. Maybe a Za'tarc? Bomb in your chest? In your teeth?  
> Lacks chloroplasts and central vacuoles; Autotrophic: I'm sure this'll upset someone but basically - not plant cells; all plants.  
> EFMB: Expert Field Medical Badge. I'm tempted to come back to this Janet thing.  
> Pop Off: Sound off without thinking about what you're actually saying/the implications thereof.  
> Post-Annapolis: here, Marine officer training after the Naval Academy (ok, actually during senior year).  
> OTS: Officer Training School (9 week for civilians with 4-year degrees).  
> A tempo: returning to the original tempo (musical term).  
> Sector Blue*: range by distance and transmission medium, given the canon inconsistencies.


End file.
